What is Affiliate Marketing?

What is Affiliate Marketing?

In the 90’s when the internet was starting to take off and become mainstream, search engines were just starting to emerge and the internet became a massive e-commerce and information machine.

Webmasters as they were called back then were creating valuable content on all kinds of subjects for their website visitors. These same people wanted to be compensated for all the hard work they were putting into content creation.

The concept of revenue sharing is not new and was not created by affiliate marketers. The concept of paying commission for referred business goes way back before affiliate marketing and the Internet. In reality, retailers use this same model except that they usually need to buy their inventory before they can sell it.

The translation of the revenue sharing principles to mainstream e-commerce happened in November 1994, almost four years after the origination of the World Wide Web and since then, affiliate marketers have made hundreds of millions of dollars in commissions from referring customers to products of all kinds.

Definition of Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is partnering with brands that offer a commission as a reward for your endorsement and referral. Affiliate marketers or resellers generally act as a middleman between customers and products. Affiliate marketers earn a commission by referring web traffic and sales through their own promotional efforts using a coded URL or web address to track each referral.

How Affiliate Marketing works

The affiliate marketer creates a relationship with businesses that have products or services to sell.

The affiliate marketer advertises the products and services, usually online using various methods.

Internet visitors interact with advertisements and marketing.

The website gets interested users from the advertisements and marketing.

The website visitor turns into a customer and purchases products or services.

The affiliate is paid a commission for the referral using a unique code in a web address or ULR.

Can you make money with Affiliate Marketing?

The short answer is yes.

Lot’s of people are making huge money as affiliate marketers.

You may recognize some of these big names that use affiliate marketing to make money online.

Neil Patel

Tony Robbins

Tai Lopez

Pat Flynn

Brent Hale

Amy Porterfield

Mike Dillard

Tim Ferriss

and the list goes on and on…

These are heavy hitters and big online brand names but for every one of these millionaire entrepreneurs, there are thousands of people like you earning some extra spending cash or an income to live on.

It is possible and realistic to make $50,000 to $100,000 per year doing this.

Where to learn more

If this sounds like something you may want to learn more about, the Affiliate Marketing Web School provides free information on what it is and how to get started.

Craig Cherlet

Craig is one of Marketing Stream's co-founders. He's spent 15+ years working with companies to develop and implement digital products & growth strategies.
Craig also blogs about online business on his personal blog at CraigCherlet.com.You can also find and follow him on these social sites.

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